Posts matching tags 'cat and girl'

The writer L.P. Hartley once stated that the past is a foreign country where they do things differently.
Today's Cat And Girl revises this, arguing that, in the age of globalisation, instantaneous communication and accelerating change, our past is more foreign to our present selves than actual foreign countries are.

Interestingly enough, the package was not postmarked from one of the five boroughs of New York, but from Tucson, Arizona, where Dorothy Gambrell's return address was given as being. I hope that her now living (presumably) among unironically-attired people doesn't dull Cat And Girl's astute focus on the commodification of underground culture, the quixotic quest for authenticity and the zen of hipsterdom.

Remember the Cat And Girl "Indie Rock Is A Dead Language" T-shirt that was on sale a while ago, and then disappeared without a trace? Well, it has been reprinted, though is available only for a short time, so if you want one, you'll have to hurry.

Over the past few weeks, Dorothy Gambrell (who draws Cat and Girl, an amusing and thought-provoking web comic (though somehow that wasn't enough to get her into the Belle & Sebastian tribute graphic novel)) has been travelling on container ships across the Pacific, from San Francisco Bay to Tokyo, Osaka and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She has now returned and posted photographs:

If today's Cat and Girl is anything to go by, the chav phenomenon has jumped the Atlantic and they've already got them in New York:

And by the look of it, it seems like they're not talking about middle-class indie-kid Anglophiles adopting British street fashion to distinguish themselves from the jocks and preppies, but actual council-estate-style chavs. Of course, it could well be that Burberry-clad hooliganism in Britain is in the news in the US.

While we're there, this Cat and Girl, from a few weeks earlier, is also really good. A small excerpt:

Meanwhile, Archie Comics, the PG-rated chronicler of American adolescence since the 1960s, goes goth:

Mind you, Stephin Merritt had the same idea eight years earlier, though he was being ironic.

Today's Cat and Girl is a good one; it extrapolates Happy Days and That 70s Show into a prediction of 1990s retro:

Come to think of it, a sitcom about slacker/hipster ironist zine kids in the 1990s could probably work. (I imagine there's laugh-track material to be extracted from anachronisms like the characters not having LiveJournals or blogs and relying on photocopied zines to get their thoughts out, having to take film to be developed, and so on; there could also be product-placement opportunities for FedEx/Kinko's or such.) It'd probably end up looking like a more polished version of Clerks or various low-budget American indie films that followed.

"Guitars are bourgeois, OK? They're expensive and the skill they demand is elitist!"

"We should be making music with computers! They're the populist medium of today!"

Mind you, computers are bourgeois and expensive too; the iBooks that all the inner city hipster kids have certainly are. Though maybe it's more authentic if you shlep along a battered beige box that looks like it was stolen out of an office and souped up numerous times, running Windows 98 and AudioMulch (or better: Linux and some home-brewed audio software; it's not going to sound as slick as Cubase, but slickness is bourgeois). Having to lug that and a 15" glass bottle to see what's going on bespeaks punk authenticity and commitment to one's art, in a way you can never get with an Apple PowerBook.

(Of course, there's no way you could carry a PC/monitor to gigs on a bicycle. Then again, real proles drive, usually battered Mazdas or Holden panelvans. Cycling everywhere is a bourgeois affectation, like vegetarianism. Discuss.)

(Btw, Graham: any ideas on how one could combine tracker modules and live performance? Perhaps a tracker with keyboard-controlled mutes/cuepoints/sample triggers could be useful for that...)

For those who missed out on the Chat et Fille T-shirt, there's a new Icelandic Cat and Girl T-shirt; perfect for wearing to Sigur Rós gigs and the like.
I'm tempted to get one, even though my credit card has seen much better days.

DG: Are the proletariat cool? Or is talking about the proletariat cool? I'm interested in culture, in society I have generally found that politics are not nearly as important as politicians claim they are.
Unless, of course, Politics starts running around the room waving its arms and shouting incoherently, as it's been doing lately. I haven't considered myself political in the past, but I can see people around me becoming much more political. I wouldn't be surprised to soon find myself among them.

What does bother me are trends disguised as inevitabilities like, say, marriage, or having a full time job. There are lots of excellent reasons to have a full-time job money and stability and getting out of the house - and there are lots of good reasons to not have a full time job - like owning your own time. If you choose to make that trade off, between stability and time, time and money, that's fine, but I do feel that a lot of people never realize that there was a choice to be made.

Incidentally, there won't be any new issues of Cat and Girl for a few weeks, because Dorothy has gone to Australia, of all places.

Two CD-Rs containing demo tracks from The Charm Offensive (a very promising new indie-pop band I saw in London some months back). Interesting; their material sounds somewhere between Birdie or Blueboy or someone and Black Box Recorder without the sarcasm (though with the conspicuous Englishness left wholly intact). I'll probably play some Charm Offensive in one of my DJ sets.

The photocopy edition of Cat and Girl #3, along with some stickers and button badges, and an amusingly useless leaflet showing bar/pie charts about the planets and their search engine statistics.

For the style-conscious indiekid:
Cat and Girl, one of the better web comics, now have some
rather twee-looking
button badges.
Wearing suggestion: on fur-lined parka with black-frame emo glasses, to
flaunt your subcultural awareness.

One year ago:

2017/11/15

LGBT+ Australians and their allies can breathe a cautious sigh of relief as one prolonged chapter of the national culture-war pantomime comes to a close, with
61.6% of Australians voting to legalise same-sex marriage .

Two years ago:

2016/12/14

Terrible reports from Aleppo as the forces of the tyrant Assad, backed by Russia, take the last pockets of resistance and exact a terrible vengeance on the resisting population. Mass executions of civilians (or, in the

Five years ago:

2013/12/16

After it emerged that Thamsanqa Jantjie, the sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela's memorial ceremony, had actually been making it up and just moving his arms about meaninglessly, Slavoj Žižek (no fan of well-meaning liberalism, to